My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘sales’

If you are a loan officer or mortgage broker looking to keep your name, and your products and services in the face of the public, you may want to consider internet marketing.

You may be thinking to yourself that you are not savvy enough with a computer in order to market via the internet.

Well, these days you don’t have to be, thanks to blogs.

One of the best ways to market yourself and your products is with your own personal blog.

Trust me, it is easier than you think.

Anyone can set up a blog in no more than five minutes and it is absolutely free. It is only a matter of finding a blog provider, which can be done very easily with a google search.

Once you have set up your blog, including domain name and template which the blogger will help you out with, you will be good to go.

On the blog, you can post a biography of yourself, as well as your picture, and the products and services you have to offer.

Now, you can add your blog address to your business card, and tell people in face to face networking to visit your blog.

Blogs are also great for long distance loan customers that you work with. By telling them to visit your blog, they can see your picture and will be able to put a face with your name. This is a great way for them to find a comfort level with you.

By using the internet as a marketing tool, you have added a great weapon to your arsenal of marketing strategies. Best of luck.

How can a business that is already successful in reaching their local market extend their marketing reach online? The good news is that the traditional offline marketing that has always worked so well will still work at least as effectively to promote your online presence. The other side of the coin is that to promote your business online, the old traditions need some updating to keep up with online marketing best practices.

Any business should already have a marketing plan and objectives from their offline initiatives, so let’s jump straight into the technology aspects of online marketing. I generally look at the following things first, because they can be done at very low or no initial cost, and also because subsequent specialist marketing won’t be as successful without these things in place. Of course there is a huge amount more to online marketing, the extent of which could easily be justified as a full-time university course. This is the pre-school notes, to help get your site to a starting point on a low budget if you can’t quite afford to be calling in the big guns to market your site for you professionally just yet.

1. Site optimization

This is always the place to start, because the effectiveness of everything which follows is often dependent on this being done up front. When I say this, I include great content and intuitive navigation as the basis for everything. Only once your site has been optimized for intelligent visitors should you tweak it for search engines, but never at the expense of the former.

Search engines look at things like keyword density and how specifically a page matches a specific search term. Of course this is extremely over simplistic, but nevertheless a worthwhile starting point. By identifying 10-20 key terms you would like search engines to pick up on, and creating specialised pages with relevant information which utilises those terms in the right way, you will start getting much better results once your site has been indexed.

You will find that it is best to use specialised keyword phrases, for example “precision-engineered bolts” is likely to get better placement than a generic term like “engineering parts”. You should also work to create a single page for every key phrase you want picked up on, and include the key phrase in the title, meta tags and use all the words in the body of the page at a high density relative to other words. You should also preferably include the key phrase in the page title, as well as the URL of the page, for example, “.mysite.com/precision_engineered_bolts/”. Each page should use a different title, specifically based on the key phrase utilised in that page’s content.

Your site should really be developed using XHTML and CSS these days, table-based design has numerous technical problems associated with it, and it results in a lower keyword density than the current standards.

Ideally you should use a content management system which incorporates and facilitates all of the above quickly and effortlessly, such as that provided standard with RealmSurfer sites. This will allow you to manage your own content optimization, with a bit of trial-and-error.

2. Linking and indexing

The next step is to get search engines to start to notice and index your site. Google, for example, won’t even look at your site until it has been linked to by at least one other indexed site. Paid inclusion (paying the search engines to index your site on a priority schedule) can be appropriate at this phase if you need to urgently accelerate this process, however it is not always necessary.

Especially useful at this stage can be participating in forums serving your primary target market. This has the dual benefit of creating awareness of your business within communities you would like to reach, and at the same time can help create incoming links to your site, something that search engines pay particular attention to. Ensure that your site details are included as a link in the footer of your posts.

Never use a forum to spam members or submit unsolicited advertising posts — that just has the opposite effect of destroying your business’ credibility. Some forums have a separate advertising section in which it may be appropriate to professionally post information about your services and products. Always make sure that your presence represents a valuable contribution to the community. Stay on topic and be professional, helpful and constructive.

Search engines take many factors into consideration when ranking a site. New sites, for example, don’t initially fare well, however you will find they will allocate some credibility weighting to you the longer your site is up and running. The biggest factor though, external to the site itself, is the number of inbound (preferably non-reciprocal) links from other sites, and the context and wording of the referring link, as well as the ranking of the referring page, and referring site. The popularity of those sites plays a big role, as well as how high up in the site’s own hierarchy the link is. By way of example, a link from .news.com.au counts for much more than a link from a very deeply embedded page like .somesitesomewhere.com/subdirectory/theattic/someoldforgottenpage .

3. Implement online marketing partnerships with high-profile online businesses

This is where you can really benefit if implemented successfully. When I was previously running the e-commerce business unit for a large company, rather than pay high-traffic websites to advertise on their sites, which can be very much untargeted, we offered them a percentage of sales. In other words, we provided them with the banners to promote the service, and implemented simple tracking of where our visitors were coming from, and then paid a percentage of the total revenue to the referrer. This resulted in very low marketing costs to us, and the referring sites started placing more and more emphasis on their side to ensure that we got top placement whenever they were low on paid inventory.

Another effective medium-term strategy is to provide content of value to sites which serve your target market. They benefit from your topical content, you benefit from the exposure and links.

4. Dabble in paid keyword advertising

Only at this point should you actually be starting to pay for online advertising. These forms of advertising, however, allow you to specifically target certain people, which means you get a much better return on investment than simply advertising to everyone. This can take some trial and error to find what works best, but the amount you pay should be less than the amount of business you generate, and should normally include full measurement and reports on a reasonably regular basis, preferably online.

For this purpose, I often suggest starting with Google. They are by far the most popular search engine globally, they have a very good reputation, provide reporting online, and are probably the most likely to produce results initially. Yahoo and MSN also have excellent paid link systems, and they keep getting better all the time. The latest offerings from all three are now also starting to allow targeting to specific demographics, a trend that is likely to become the preferred way to target online audiences once the capabilities for this type of targeting matures.

5. Involve an internet marketing specialist

At this point, you should be starting to see some results, and be in a good position to ask some intelligent questions. Preferably deal only with a business that has a good reputation (ask for client contact details so you can find out how effective they are), and has preferably has been around for at least a few years. They should also provide very detailed reports (ask for examples of these up front), and be able to explain in detail how they go about promoting your site, on which sites they do so, the number of views and clickthroughs per site per day, and how effective each promotion was relative to the next. They should also meet with you at least once a month to review successes and failures and involve you in the decision-making process of where next to promote your business. At least monthly, you should be in a position to evaluate your cost per sale for various promotions, and to change your focus accordingly.

Especially be wary of businesses who claim unrealistically quick results, or base their business mainly only on search engine submission, or use deceptive practices to try and “trick” search engines into ranking you higher. These usually at best produce no value, and can in some cases lead to your site being removed or ranked very low by search engines.

So, you have decided to market on the internet. You researched the market. You waded through all the technical jargon of how to make a website. You registered your domain. You set up your auto responder, now you need to find some ebook to give away so that you can build up your mailing list. This is the point where many newbies are bound to make a critical mistake. You have just spent a good amount of money for all the setting up of your website. The next month’s bills are already on the horizon if not upon you. The pressure is great to get some sales going. The temptation is now is to just grab any old ebook to give away as an offer to your visitors in return for their email address. Do not do it!!!

Look at it this way. Do you introduce yourself with a smile or with a frown? Giving away something of little or no value to your visitors is a frown. No matter how good your product is, most people are not going to buy until about the seventh contact with you. If their first impression of you is negative, you can kiss their business goodbye.

I am talking from personal experience. I recently came upon a really cool website. The owner of this site offered a free newsletter. I signed up not thinking much about it. At that point in time I was considering creating an ebook in PDF format. My problem was that I did not have $300 to spend on a PDF writing program. The first free newsletter arrived from the “cool website”. Well that was my lucky day. In the newsletter this guy gave me a fantastic tip. He showed me how to create a PDF ebook with totally free software. Just one little insight contained in a free newsletter saved me 300 bucks, and that was only the tip of the iceberg. Don’t you think that I will now feel that this guy is worth my trust? Well here is how much I trust him because he over delivered on what he promised. I am writing this article because he told me to.

The moral of the story: Deliver more than you promise, it will translate in trust, good will and most importantly, more sales.

.makebucksonline.com

What I’m about to explain to you will change to way you do your online marketing Today, Tomorrow and Years to come with little effort on your part.

This simple But effective technique involves the use of a ‘Pop-Up’ on your website, but, the difference between this technique and just a standard ‘Pop-Up’ or ‘Exit Pop-Up’ as we all see them is that when your potential prospects see them they are more then willing to give you there Name and Email address.

Why you ask?

Because your offering them something of Value for FREE.

As you well know the word ‘Free’ is one of the most Powerful words on the internet when used correctly and when combined with an ‘Pop-Up’… it could make you alot of extra money with little effort.

As a marketer myself, a simple Name and Email Address is worth hundreds, if not thousands of extra dollars a year if I collect and follow-up my leads properly, but, the questions that always seem to arise are…

…How do I do it? …What steps do I need to take?

So… now that I have your attention, let me explain to you how this can be achieved in a simple ‘Step-By-Step’ fashion.

Step #1:

What do you have that you can give away to your visitors as they leave your website that is of value to your visitor and more importantly, will benefit from?(Here’s a hint… Free Reports, eBooks, eCourses, etc.)

(Note: Give away brandable ebooks, reports, etc. with your affiliate links embedded within them. Make sure they’re related to the subject of the content.)

Step #2:

Once you’ve figured out what your going to give away, put together some ad copy for your ‘Pop-Up’ that your going to build that will grab your visitors attention and get them to sign-up for your ‘Free Offer’ or ‘Give Away’ as they leave your website.

(Note: You don’t have write alot, just a few attention grabbing sentences pointing out the ‘Benefits’ of your offer.)

Step #3:

Write a short Solo. You need this because after they sign-up through your web-form from your pop-up, this is what they will receive in there Inbox with either download info or other instructions that you specify in order for them to receive there Report, eBook, eCourse, etc.

(Note: Also, make sure you attach a ‘Signature File’ at the end of your Solo. Many marketer’s forget this part and are losing out on alot of extra profits. Don’t Forget!)

Step #4:

You need to go to your ‘Auto-responder’ management console and set-up an seperate auto-responder with the solo you wrote for your ‘Free Offer’ and/or ‘Give Away’.

Once you’ve set your auto-responder its now time for you to copy the HTML code for your auto-responder’s Web-Form and paste it into the ‘Pop-Up’ you just put together.

(Note: Auto-responder services may very. Simply follow there directions.)

Step #5:

This is the easy part, once you have completed all of the other steps, simply paste your ‘Pop-Up’ code into your desired webpage(s).

If you use pop-up software that creates and automatically inserts the code for you simply select the webpage you want the code to be placed on and the software will do the rest.

Now simply upload your newly formatted webpage and pop-up to your host and start sending it Traffic!

As a general rule, test out your pop-up for your first week a see how it pulling. You may need to tweek it if its not performing to your stardards. All it takes is just a few words to be changed to make your pop-up a success.

That’s it… your Done!

These are the 5 basic steps needed to turn your website into an fully ‘Automated Sales Machine’ that will automatically follow-up your leads 24/7/365 without you lifting a finger.

It may take a little time to set-up initially, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

Now, I just have one last tip for you.

If you really want to get the most out of your Pop-Up and the leads it brings in simply load-up your already set-up ‘Auto-Responder’ with 6 or 7(or however many you want) follow-up emails and set them to go out every 3 to 4 weeks.

For maximum results make sure that you target the particular Product or Service you are offering or promoting because it makes no sense to offer a Product or Service that doesn’t relate to what your initial offer was that they signed up for.

To have a successful Internet business, you need only three things:

1. Product

2. Copywriting

3. Traffic

It really is that simple. If you have those three things… competently performed, you will have a succesful, profitable Internet business. Let’s talk about competency in each of those three areas and how you can quickly master each one.

Product

You need a product that people want. Don’t fall in love with a product just because you think it’s cool. I’ll go into details in a future article, but I look at two things to determine if a product is wanted enough for me to sell it:

1. Are there people searching for that product (I use the Overture tool)

2. Are fellow marketers willing to pay a significant amount of money for traffic for that search term because people are buying (I also use the Overture tool).

I multiply those two numbers. If the result is higher than the result for the product “air guns”, I’m willing to get into that market. Why “air guns”? It was simply my first profitable product. Can products that score lower than “air guns” be profitable? I’m sure they can, but there are enough markets that score higher than “air guns”, I’m not willing to chance it.

BTW, don’t get too hung up on the product. It is the least important of the three items. Copywriting and traffic are infinitely more important to your business. Don’t spend two years developing a product. There are already thousands of products available on the Internet that you can market and earn a percentage as an affiliate. Choosing your product should take no longer than a half an hour, not two years. You can run the numbers for 6-10 product ideas in less than half an hour and make your decision. Then start concentrating on what really matters… which is…

Copywriting

Now you need to describe your product. You will do this in many ways. You will create a sales page on a web-site that will describe the product and try to sell it. You will write small text ads to run on PPC search engines. You will write similar one and two line descriptions to enter into affiliate networks. You will write articles and resource boxes for those articles. You may even write a signature line for use on forums.

The point is that copywriting is what conveys the message about your product. It is simply some words. You can sometimes uses pictures and videos, but it is generally the words that actually do the selling. Don’t forget that you are in the business of words.

How do you decide what words to use? You have three choices if you are a beginner:

1. Hire a high priced copywriter. Generally you will want to pay $5,000-$10,000 per sales page for a decent copywriter. Drop me a note if you want referrals. I know two of the best.

2. Use copywriting software that scores words. I recommend Glyphius which you can read more about at Glyphius.com. It scores your prospective ad copy against a massive database of profitable ads. You can simply make up some copy and click the score button. Then change it and click the score button again. Pick the highest scoring text after you have worked with it for awhile. You’ll have copy that the pros will envy and more importantly… copy that will convert that traffic into customers.

3. Fail for a long time while you are learning. Don’t laugh. Most Internet marketers choose this path. If you are persisent enough, you will learn what works and what doesn’t.

Traffic

Once you have copy that sells, you need to get people to see it. We call that “traffic” on the Internet.

There are dozens of ways to get traffic on the Internet. Let me focus on two ways that I recommend to beginners because both are free (well; there is a small one-time cost to get started, but you don’t pay for each visitor like some other sources).

1. Search Engine Optimization – get free traffic from the search engines by being ranked high for the search terms associated with your product.

2. Article Submission – get recognition and links to your site by writing and submitting articles.

Let’s talk about Search Engine Optimization first. First of all, DO NOT waste weeks and months of your life listening to the lemmings on the SEO forums. In my experience, they are just the blind leading the blind. There are three factors to search engine optimization you should focus on:

a) Your domain and URLs

b) On page optimization

c) Links to your site

For the first, I recommend you choose your domain and URL structure using Nemeas. You can read about it at Nemeas.com. It is very simple to use and is also based on a massive statistical analysis of the leading search engine. You simply score prospective domains and URLs and select the highest scoring one.

I don’t recommend any on page optimization unless you are creating free content sites to feed traffic to your sales page. Instead, optimize your sales page for selling with Glyphius and don’t worry about the on page search engine factors.

For getting inbound links to your site, I recommend article submission. I recommend that you use Artemis Pro. You can read more about it at ArtemisPro.com. It gives you a boost above any other currently available article submission tool because it submits a unique article to each publisher. That boost can amount to an 1875% increase in effectiveness given the same amount of time invested.

At the end of each article, you should have a resource box with a link back to the site with your sales page. That resource box should be optimized with Glyphius.

That’s it. Running a successful, profitable Internet business is really just that simple. It’s just choosing the right product, choosing the right words for your copywriting and choosing the best way to get traffic to your sales page.

Please visit my blog often at .JamesBrausch.com for further lessons on the simplicity of Internet marketing. I’ll post regular lessons there. Every entry on my blog is categorized into three topic areas: Product, Copywriting and Traffic. Just choose one of the topics to find out more information about that area of running a successful Internet business.

Here’s to your success!

Affiliate advertising represents a massive opportunity to profit from your website, and with any profitable medium there will be people searching for methods of increasing their own slice of the pie by “playing the system”. Why take risks yourself with a product or service when programs such as Google Adsense enable you to profit from others desire to drive traffic and sales to their companies?

You may be tempted to simply create a website with the express intention of selling advertising space. This is a proven business method after all, free local newspapers and newsletters have been operating for years based entirely on advertising revenue and classifieds, and the majority of the worlds television stations can only stay in business by telling you about their sponsors and advertisers products.

The world wide web offers advertisers an low overheads, an unrivalled market reach all combined with a level of statistical feedback that traditional non-interactive media can only dream of. This makes online business extremely attractive but also extremely competitive. Advertisers need to find ways of raising awareness of their products and services against global competition. Maximising penetration in such a massive arena would take more resources than most companies can muster. Enter the affiliate marketeers.

You, as a website publisher become an affiliate by agreeing with companies that you will promote their product on your website. In return the advertisers will pay you for bringing traffic or sales to their website. The more traffic or converted sales you bring the more you will earn for your efforts. By the same measure the more traffic you bring to your own web pages the more you potentially stand to earn from your affiliates.

At this point many affiliate marketeers will disengage their brain, concentrating their efforts on bringing web surfers to their site in order to push them on to their affiliates. Often the webmasters of these sites will be well versed in search engine technology, understanding the core concepts of optimised site design, keyword targetting, external linking and content generation that will increase the “relevance” of their page in the indexes of Google, Yahoo and MSN. It is often the final, and tellingly the most time consuming of these techniques that will merit the least attention in the minds of professional web marketeers.

Often an amount of statistical analysis will take place to identify search trends and high paying affiliate industries that will potentially have the highest payout. A site will then be designed with search engine optimisation at the forefront, simple coding practices that will enable an algorithm to make a good attempt at cataloging the subject matter of the page and relate it to the identified keywords. Search engine experts are also well aware that sites which are updated frequently are treated as “more relevant” in the search engine index. This is a simple equation, if you are searching for information on MP3 players you want to be presented with content telling you about the features of the latest iPod and reviewing the new competing models. You aren’t interested in reviews of a 5 year old device with the ergonomics and storage capacity of a housebrick.

In their rush for content a number of affiliate marketeers will turn to external sources, be it in the form of user generated content or “article directories”. Both can be useful tools for time-challenged webmasters, and particularly in the case of article directories which take the form of free to publish text on almost any subject imaginable. Simply search for an article on your particular subject of choice, paste it into you template, upload it to your site and wait for the search engines to pick it up. Hey presto you are instantly a more relevant site and bumping yourself up the Google results while still leaving yourself time to spend your hard earned affiliate money at the pub.

So far so good but don’t forget the wisdom of your parents generation, “buyer beware” and “you get what you pay for”. Well if you are paying nothing more than a tiny fraction of your internet bill for these articles then you might want to consider the motives of the author of that lovely keyword rich article you just found.

The fact is there are many valuable articles in directories such as EZineArticles and ZapContent.com, but the mistake many webmasters make in their rush for search engine optimised content it that they don’t read, and I mean really read the text that they are merrily pasting into their site. Before hitting ctrl-c ask yourself “does this content really benefit my readers”. The chances are the best content from these services will find itself syndicated across a number of sites, or the information will be republished in differing forms. As people use their search engines to find information they will look at a number of websites and will soon realise which content has been regurgitated ad-nausium. Net result is if their first impression of your site is one that offers the same old information they won’t bother coming back.

Even worse, a number of prolific authors have an ulterior motive. They are simply trying to boost their own search relevance by increasing the number of backlinks to their own websites. If an article you find is borderline check the authors history. If they have submitted hundreds of pages of almost identical content stuffed to the gills with the same keywords the chances are they are simply link-spamming. They don’t care if you publish their content or not, each page in the directory linking back to their website in order to boost their page rank. Would your readers really be interested in such sloppy content? I’m sure mine wouldn’t.

This takes us neatly onto the key message. Why do people return to a website and hopefully trust their sponsors? Because the site has personality, your readers should be able to identify with your informational pages, hopefully they will book mark your page, even tell others to read it. Repeat visitors are far more likely to finally visit your sponsors than those who find your page once and then head back to their search engine of choice. By all means use relevant articles but never compromise your content by relying too much on third party content.

But aside from the human element there is a far more serious reason for ensuring your content is the best, and most original it can be and that is the nature of search engines. Companies such as Google know that their market position is based entirely on trust in their organic results. Expect their search algorithms in future to be tweaked against certain types of syndicated content in order to give the (perceived) best service to their searchers. Spending time now on good quality, original and easily updated content could save you time in the long run as you avoid spending time chasing your page rankings against ever more sophisticated relevance algorithms.

Online shopping is the latest trend among customers. Why would you still go to the shop personally when you can do shopping from the comforts of your own home? Because of the rising popularity of online shopping, more and more business persons are setting up their own ecommerce websites to meet the needs of customers and of course, earn big money online.

There is a very bright future for ecommerce websites. As long as there are needs that should be met, there will be customers. For ecommerce website owners, earning money online can be so easy. If people need your products and services, your website will stay alive as long as you want.

Online Competition For Ecommerce Websites

Because of the increasing numbers of online shoppers, there is a need for more ecommerce websites. The problem, however, is that there seem to be several ecommerce websites now. A lot of business persons have answered the call to sell something online. This makes online competition very tough.

Just think about this, if you sell health and beauty products online, there are hundred more several websites like yours. They also offer the same products and services. If there is one customer looking for a health product, he has a hundred choices to choose from. So how can you increase your website’s chance of getting that customer?

Plan Ahead And Market Your Ecommerce Website

This is one thing that most ecommerce website owners do not completely understand. Most of them think that once they have set up their websites, they don’t have to do anything anymore. They will just sit and wait for sales. This may be true ages ago, but with the tough competition now, if you don’t do anything, you won’t get any sales.

Ecommerce websites need two things to consider. First is planning and the second is marketing. Before setting up the website, there must be a thorough planning first. In planning, you must consider the target market, budget, design and other factors that will affect the overall performance of the website.

Second is website marketing. After you have set up your website, you need to work on a marketing campaign. Through marketing, you can make your website more popular and visible to your target market. There are several web marketing options which you can use. The choice of the web marketing option depends on the need of your website.

Remember not to stop working on your website after the set up. If you stop working on it, the sales will also stop. Continually market your website for continuous sales.